An acclaimed filmmaker's grumble could be the catalyst that brings a centuries-extinct giant bird back from the dead.

A collaboration between the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, Colossal Biosciences, and The Lord of the Rings director Sir Peter Jackson aims to bring back the South Island giant moa in New Zealand, which was hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago.

According to Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm, the project began with a visit from the Oscar-winning director to the Texas-based company.

Colossal is best-known for its headline project of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, and was recently in the headlines for recreating the "direwolf" of Game of Thrones fame.

But, Lamm said, they have a list of other extinct animals they hope to be able to bring their scientific nous to bear on.

"And while Peter was looking at that list, he said, 'I'm disappointed that the moa's not on there'," Lamm told 9news.com.au.

Jackson offered to help fund the project and, when he was told that Colossal would need a New Zealand representative to help them arrange meetings and agreements with bodies such as museums and Māori iwi (tribes), Jackson declared himself ready to fill that role, too.

Lamm said the subsequent memorandum of understanding entailed the deepest collaboration Colossal had yet undertaken with local Indigenous groups, an "exciting" new threshold.

The Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, which was established in 2011 to support the intellectual growth and development of Ngāi Tahu, the principal iwi (tribe) of the southern region of New Zealand, will essentially serve as the director of the project.

This will allow local communities and whānau (families) to help guide the process, along with foregrounding local cultural knowledge and values.

Colossal started the moa genome sampling process in October last year.

While this project is focused - at this point - on resurrecting the South Island giant moa, there were nine species of moa overall, and Lamm said they hoped to build a sequence for all nine.

Colossal was looking at 50 years of engagement in New Zealand, he enthused, with an additional goal of demonstrating the value of building "biobanks" of genomic sequences for extinct and threatened species, as an aid to current conservation practices.

Lamm said there was no firm timeline in place for the first moa births, but he anticipated it would be less than nine or 10 years.

"It could be as few as six – that's a bit on the optimistic side, but we are getting better at estimating these as we go on," he said.

Previous breakthroughs on a parallel project involving the dodo were also applicable to the moa.

The nine species of moa ranged in size from about that of a turkey to the South Island giant moa's remarkable size of 3.6m in height and 230kg in weight.

The big, flightless herbivores played a crucial role in the local ecology, but went extinct about 600 years ago, within a century of two of Polynesian settlement.

"During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, moa provided meat for sustenance, and bones and feathers for tools and decoration, especially in Te Waipounamu," Ngāi Tahu Research Centre director Professor Mike Stevens said.

"And the loss of moa, through over-harvesting and habitat modification, was a salutary lesson as to the New Zealand archipelago's 'fragile plenty'."

Lamm said the moa project "ticked all the boxes" for Colossal - involving a species that served a major ecological purpose, had been hunted to extinction, and could even grab the attention of future scientists-in-waiting.

"The giant moa is probably one of the most dinosaur-proximate species humans have ever lived next to," he said.

"And what kid out there doesn't have dinosaurs on the brain?"

Jackson said he was "delighted" to be involved in the partnership.

"There's a lot of science still to be done – but we can start looking forward to the day when birds like the moa or the huia are rescued from the darkness of extinction," he said.

"Exciting times lay ahead! Even the journey will bring incredible insights about the history of this land and enrich discussions as to the potential nature of our future here."

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